99 years after the Ford Model T, the Tata Nano has been announced in India for 100,000 rupees, or about $2500. And you know what? It looks amazingly good. I was completely expecting a Yugo ugly box, but you could drop this 10 foot long car into an urban street in Europe (the most competitive subcompact market on the planet) and it would fit right in. It looks amazingly refined and interesting - heck, it looks better than budget models selling for many times the price from most mainstream manufacturers.

And they have a website that is fairly Web 2.0, with customer feedback, a conversational letter from the chairman, and colored gradient boxes to complete the look.

It also raises some interesting possibilities for domino effects — more on that in a moment.

The car has a 2-cylinder engine and reportedly gets 54mpg. It only creates 33hp, and tops out at 65mph. Of course, if a lot of them are sold then street congestion will be so bad that 65mph won’t be a serious limit and 54mpg is unlikely in stop-and-go traffic. Ecological concerns are of obviously a major issue if hundreds of millions of new buyers suddenly take to the car. Supposedly it produces less emissions than the mopeds that poor Indians currently ride (the next cheapest car is twice as much), since it uses a 4-stroke not 2-stroke engine. Nevertheless, it probably has worse mpg, requires far more energy and resources to fabricate the Nano than mopeds, and takes up more space on the road so density is decreased (so less efficient).

But the Nano has some strong upsides of comfort and safety also:

Mr. Ratan N. Tata [Chairman of the Tata Group] said, “I observed families riding on two-wheelers - the father driving the scooter, his young kid standing in front of him, his wife seated behind him holding a little baby. It led me to wonder whether one could conceive of a safe, affordable, all-weather form of transport for such a family. Tata Motors’ engineers and designers gave their all for about four years to realise this goal. Today, we indeed have a People’s Car, which is affordable and yet built to meet safety requirements and emission norms, to be fuel efficient and low on emissions. We are happy to present the People’s Car to India and we hope it brings the joy, pride and utility of owning a car to many families who need personal mobility.”

By adopting the term “the people’s car” Tata is explicitly referring to the VW Bettle, a similarly inexpensive car that was designed to help bring affordable mobility to the German population, and which went on to become a cultural icon worldwide representing freedom and independence (despite its Nazi roots).

And while the Beetle is an obvious reference, the Ford Model-T is a more accurate forecaster of the future the Nano may bring. Just as trains and inexpensive cars like the Model-T led to transformation of population centers, massive shifts in attitudes toward city and rural areas, flexibility of employment and education, broadening of social perspectives through travel, and shifts in family dynamics and roles, the Nano may bring the same to India.

From a business perspective, Tata has had to do some radical things to achieve the $2500 price. They have worked closely with component suppliers and brought them close to the assembly plant to reduce costs (like Dell does).

The design team practiced a concurrent engineering model with many iterative physical prototypes, working in a skunk works fashion away from the “hidebound” practices of the larger Tata organization, and collaborated early on with component vendors to sort through problems.

Like the manufacturing line of the Model-T which had far reaching implications for the American manufacturing industry (and economy), if other Indian companies can harness the lessons of Tata’s Nano, we will see a transformation of the entire country in the next decade even beyond what is already coming.

As 2007 comes to a close, here is my eclectic, contrarian, and surely incomplete list of favorite things that appeared or I discovered in 2007.

Software

Nisus Writer Pro: My bar-none favorite word processor. The Pro version was introduced this year as a step up from the Express version that’s been around for a few years. It’s deceptively simple looking, yet smoothly incorporates a robust feature set with an elegant interface and beautiful display of type. As a processor of words (as opposed to wannabe page layout app) it is unparalleled. If you are in the wordsmithing business, try this app.

Journler: This app has been out for a while but I just started using it this year. It is one of the few apps other than Camino that I keep open 24/7. See my earlier review (note that Journler is switching from a donation to paid model)

Numbers and Keynote: These two apps are part of iWork 07, Apple’s “productivity” suite that somewhat competes with Microsoft Office. At $79 for three apps it’s a screaming deal. Since I don’t use Pages (see Nisus Pro above…) Numbers and Keynote have been the two standouts for me. At last someone has taken a fresh look at the spreadsheet, and Numbers succeeds brilliantly. Yes it is missing some power functions, but it is aiming at a pro-sumer audience and for that it is perfect. Finally, someone has done cut/paste correctly - Excel’s method of doing this standard operation has always grated on me where the cut doesn’t take effect until the paste has been done.

While not perfect and with some frustrating oddities, the new version of Keynote brings some excellent features like easy to use path-based animation, new evocative canned animations and transitions, and instant alpha masking. But it also has important small features that improve productivity, like per-paragraph formatting (as opposed to Powerpoint’s per-text-block), groupings of slides in the flimstrip, and object-locking. (This version of Kenote addresses some of my complaints about Powerpoint.)

Squarespace 4.0+: This blog runs on the Squarespace platform, and the new versions released this year have brought excellent new capabilities in site search, statistics reporting, as well as overall refinements. I’ve used several other hosted and non-hosted blogging platforms and Squarespace trumps them all in its ease of use, UI elegance, and personal customer service.

Hardware

Pentax K10D: Everybody else will have the iPhone on their lists (and rightly so), so I’m going orthogonally here to recognize a prosumer digital SLR from a second-tier camera maker. The K10D brought high end features like weather sealing, anti-shake in the body, lots of AF points, large viewfinder, built-in DNG support, and a novel approach to ISO adjustment to a new low price level (under $600 now). Plus I think it is the most handsome of today’s 10 megapixel SLRs, and has excellent ergonomics. It’s shown here with one of Pentax’s unique “pancake” lenses that are great for street photography.

Media and Events

The Decemberists, The Crane Wife. Strictly speaking this came out toward the end of 2006, but I didn’t hear it til early 07. It’s been on my “turntable” steadily all year and has remained fresh and interesting.
Children of Men: It’s been a good year for apocalypse movies, kicked off with the stunning Children of Men. Layered with meaning and symbols, and a tension-filled story to propel it along, and great performances all around. Peter Merholz wrote up a good review.
Charlie Wilson’s War: Who would have thought that insider deal making and arms deals could be so uproariously funny? This movie had the audience in stitches, while driving home some hard lessons about not “fucking up the endgame” as Wilson puts it in the closing titles. Tom Hanks and Philip Seymour Hoffman are at the top of their game.
Made to Stick: At once common sense and profound, this book is a must-read for anyone that has to communicate complex ideas and motivate others to action. Read my earlier review.
Nobel Peace Prize: 2007 was a tipping point in environmental awareness, and the joint awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change was a key contributor. It will be looked back upon as a turning point in mass consciousness.

 

Cars

Fiat Cinquecento: Finally a car to truly challenge the small-car crown of the MINI. To see one is to want one. Will they bring it to the US? Let’s hope so. (Review)
Alfa Romeo Competizione 8c: Just beautiful. How much is it? Who cares? (Official site)
Audi TT: Pictures of this had left me cold, but seeing it in person is another story. Not as iconic as the original, but it evolves the form in a sophisticated way. (Official site)

 

Serious Wheels has some highly stylized images of the new super-high-end Lamborghini Reventon. Only 20 will be made, and will cost some four times as much as Lambo’s previously most expensive model, the Murcielago LP640.

The car’s styling actually disappoints me, though it is unarguably striking, and is explicitly influenced by fighter jets. The press release (cited on Serious Wheels) states:

With the Reventón the [Lamborghini] Centro Stile designers have coherently developed this philosophy, inspired by another sphere where speed and dynamism reign absolute: modern aeronautics, responsible for the fastest and most agile airplanes in the world. This has created an extremely precise, technically striking style with a new vitality: interrupted lines and contorted surfaces create a fascinating play of light, giving the car incredible movement.

Clearly the F117 Nighthawk fighter is the reference point here, as it is really the only fighter that looks this jagged and planar. It was designed in the late 70’s, first appeared in the 1983 Gulf War, and is to be retired next year. Subsequent stealthy jets have been much more rounded, as the computational abilities to create the radar-evading surfaces have improved. And while the press release speaks about dynamics, stealthy aircraft are notorious for the instability, requiring constant computer correction or they would spin out of control.

Frankly it surprises me that it has taken almost 25 years for car design to be heavily influenced by the distinguished aesthetic of the stealth planes. When Harley Earl created the streamlined aesthetic for GM, it was roughly contemporaneous with the jets and rockets that inspired it.

What bugs me about the Reventon is that Lamborghini has essentially outsourced its design aesthetic. Instead of continuing their tradition of radical design that looks unlike anything else on the road at the time (e.g., the Miura, the Countach), they have borrowed the aesthetics for this limited-run special almost whole cloth from somewhere else. Even the cockpit has over-the-top references to aircraft instrumentation, with the speedometer and tach looking like a view of runway lights seen from approach. (Otherwise the cockpit is pretty run-of-the-mill.) It is disappointing that they did not take this opportunity to once again progress the state of the art in car styling. Instead the Reventon seems more like a look back.

Related posts:

Innovation Comes from Unexpected Places (or Neglected Ones)

 

Judging from photos the 2008 Malibu is a huge break from the previous dull model. It’s much more stylish (though still fairly conservative), the proportions and fit/finish look a lot better, and the interior is worlds apart in aesthetics and materials treatments. Only first-person experience will bear these things out, as well of course how it drives. But what also is impressive is GM’s TV campaign for it.

The tag line is “The car you can’t ignore”. While this may not be true on an absolute level (compared to a Lamborghini Gallardo for example), it is definitely true compared to the last Malibu. And what I love is that GM is addressing that head on, and poking some fun at itself in the process. It’s a gutsy move.

One of the ads features a gang of robbers sitting in their getaway car outside the bank they’ve just hit. They are still wearing their masks, and stare out the windows as police cars scream to a halt outside the bank steps. The police run straight inside, by passing the robbers in the car. The gag - they are so anonymous because of the car they are in that the police ignored them.

In another spot, a jogger runs down a sidewalk and then crosses over the street. She runs smack into the side of a car parked on the other side, not having seen it because it was so boring.

The car so anonymous it’s invisible in both cases? A late 90’s GM! It’s actually an Oldsmobile Cutlass, though it also looks very similar to the outgoing Malibu in profile.

Good for you GM, not taking yourself too seriously and fessing up to the fact you’ve made some mighty bland vehicles in your time. The Malibu is a significant mainstream vehicle for GM, so let’s hope it lives up to the early hyep.

Robbery ad on Jalopnik
Jogger ad on Jalopnik
Video interview with the 2008 Malibu designers

 

Here’s an eye-opening crash test done by a Russian magazine of a Chinese-made Chery car. The test is similar to the European standard test, which involves driving a car at 64kph/40mph into a barrier where only a portion of the front of the car hits it. To quote from Autosavant:

The test dummy became so entwined in the wreckage that it had to be removed from the car in pieces; he basically became part of the dashboard and steering wheel. The results were so bad that AvtoRevu called on Chery to immediately withdraw the car from the market. Chery declined to do so.

Chrysler and GM have each established manufacturing agreements with Chery. 

For comparison, check out this video of a much smaller Smart Car (manufactured by Mercedes) hitting a wall at 70mph.